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March 29, 2009

Surviving the Downturn...

This was the front page from February 10, 2009 for the Santa Fe New Mexican. I liked the headline and took a digital shot for my study of the economic crisis and media.Newspapers are dying and there is not a reason for me to buy this daily paper except to get the inside special edition Pasatiempo published on Friday. And I do like the ads for that special issue.

The newspaper business is dying fast with death throes and rattles and I'm bored even trying to report the dire bad news of the news. I knew when I could easily do desk top publishing way back when in the early 90s that the gatekeeper mode was breaking and anyone could publish to anyone at a much reduced cost. Whenever we pick up a newspaper here in Santa Fe we lament that it is already news we've seen online. But over the weekend we had three papers delivered to our driveway and we'd not subscribed at all. How do you get rid of papers you don't want, besides using them to start pinyon fires?

Naomi had commented on my post earlier about NYU professor Jay Rosen's article, Flying Seminar In The Future of News, which I had read. Go read it. It is a great March 2009 wrap up of links for mindcasting on the crashing of the newspaper industry and imagining a new news system.

The latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.